For Los Angeles Museum, a ‘Transformative’ Gift of Modernists

LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced Wednesday that it had been promised a gift of 130 mostly Modernist works, including 20 by Picasso, a group of 21 watercolors and paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky and sculptures by Alberto Giacometti. The museum described the gift as a “transformative addition” to its collection that “in many cases represents Lacma’s first major work by that artist.”

The gift came from Janice and Henri Lazarof, longtime collectors and Los Angeles residents. Mr. Lazarof, a well-known composer who was born in Bulgaria in 1932, is a professor emeritus in music at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In a news release issued after an article in The Los Angeles Times detailed the gift, the museum described it as “fractional and promised.”

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The Lazarof collection will add several prominent works to the holdings of the Los Angeles Museum of Art: above, Half Figure, an alabaster work by Henry Moore.Credit
Photographs by Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at the museum, said in an interview that the museum now owns a small percentage of every work in the Lazarof collection, and that the remainder would be transferred over time.

The gift was announced two months before the institution’s planned opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a building that is part of a continuing renovation and expansion of the museum’s campus. It was designed by the architect Renzo Piano as a showcase for the contemporary art collection of Eli Broad, the Los Angeles philanthropist and billionaire.

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Three Free Circles, a watercolor and ink by Kandinsky.Credit
Los Angles County Museum of Art

Mr. Broad has not donated or promised his collection to the museum. The art world has long speculated over whether he will ultimately do so.

In a new release Michael Govan, the museum’s director since 2006, characterized the Lazarof collection as highly significant. “At a time when the art market has made it nearly impossible for museums to purchase works of this quality, this important acquisition brings to the people of Los Angeles works by key figures that define the modern century,” he said.

Selected works from the Lazarof collection will be put on display at the museum beginning Jan. 13 in its Ahmanson Building. A museum spokeswoman declined to comment on how many works would be included in the initial exhibition and when the museum would receive full title to the Lazarof collection.

In addition to the Picassos, Kandinskys, Klees and Giacomettis, highlights of the gift include three Cubist canvases by Georges Braque and two sculptures by Henry Moore. The collection is rich in sculpture, with examples by Louise Nevelson, Archipenko and Arp.

Among the works that are a first by an artist in the museum collection are two versions of the sculpture “Bird in Space” by Constantin Brancusi, as well as works by Joseph Csaky, Hannah Höch and Robert Michel.

The works will significantly expand what is acknowledged to be an incomplete and spotty collection at the museum. Ms. Barron said that while at any time only about 2 percent of the museum’s total collection is on display, “in the modern collection probably 90 percent of our B-plus and better works are on view.”

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Head of a Woman, a work from Picassos Rose period.Credit
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

“We have a good collection, but we never had a deep collection,” Ms. Barron said. “This gift transforms the depth and breadth of what we have.”

The Lazarof works will extend the reach of the museum’s collection of German artists, which Ms. Barron said had been strong in the early Expressionist period of the 1900s but weaker in the Bauhaus years of the 1920s.

Similarly the collection will greatly expand the museum’s Picasso holdings, which had consisted of four paintings, three sculptures and a number of works on paper, Ms. Barron said. The additions include three portraits of Dora Maar, with whom Picasso lived for a decade beginning in the mid-1930s, and “Head of a Woman,” a late Rose-period painting from the fall of 1906.

The gift will also add to the museum new forms of work by artists who are represented in its collections in other ways, including the museum’s first de Kooning sculpture, its first painting by Giacometti and its first sculpture by Joan Miró.

The Lazarof collection also includes what will be the museum’s first Futurist work, by Giacomo Balla. Such works, by artists working in Italy on the eve of World War I, “are incredibly rare, unless you were buying them in the ’40s and ’50s,” Ms. Barron said.

Correction: December 14, 2007

Because of an editing error, an article in The Arts on Thursday about a promised gift of 130 artworks from Janice and Henri Lazarof to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art included an outdated reference to tax law governing partial donations. (The museum now owns a small percentage of each work, and the remainder is to be transferred over time.) Under the current law, the tax deduction for partial gifts does not rise from year to year if works appreciate in value. Thus donors no longer benefit from bigger deductions for such appreciation.

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